This document pays a tribute to the negotiators from the South who have, under very complicated circumstances, bravely negotiated the extremely complex climate change issue on behalf of the region. It responds to the expressed needs of Southern negotiators over the last 10 years. Individually many are of excellent calibre and highly respected (see the excellent reviews of Ambassador Estrada's performance in 1997 by Mwandosya 1999; and Oberthür and Ott 1999). At the same time, there is a constant surge of new negotiators who are actually primarily meteorologists, environmentalists, policymakers and scientists, who have to don the garb of a "negotiator" at the negotiations. The implicit understanding in many developing countries is that these experts must learn on the job. In the meanwhile, the negotiations continue at an unrelenting pace, making no allowances for the unprepared negotiator.

Hence, this document provides, on the one hand, a backpacker's guide to the negotiating context and, on the other hand, sums up the key problems faced by negotiators and ways to deal with these problems. This "Survival Guide" combines descriptions of substance and procedure; simplicity with detail, theory with practical tips, ideas with material for further research and words with figures. It is a manual to assist the South in general, and Southern negotiators in particular, in dealing with the negotiations.

In preparing the materials, I was inspired and advised by Christiana Figueres, Angela Churie Kallhauge, Victoria Kellett, Youba Sokona, Jacob Swager, Farhana Yamin and in particular, by Alison Drayton, former chair of the G-77 in the climate change negotiations during 1999. This document is the product of two projects of the Climate Change Knowledge Network, a network with members from 14 research institutes in developed and developing countries. The first project was initiated by the Center for Sustainable Development of the Americas, Washington, which focuses on the negotiating capacity of negotiators from Latin America and the Caribbean. It had financial support from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Wallace Global Foundation, and the Andean Development Corporation. The second was conducted by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, Winnipeg, in partnership with Environnement et Développement du Tiers-Monde, Senegal, with financial support from Norway and Canada for enhancing negotiating capacity in Africa. The Institute for Environmental Studies, Amsterdam, has been actively involved in both projects. The dynamics of the two projects led to different types of training workshops being adopted, but in many ways lessons can be learnt from both projects and these have been incorporated in this report.

Heartfelt thanks to all the other trainers and resource people including Ambassador Rogatien Biaou, Brook Boyer, Chad Carpenter, Beatrice Chaytor, H.W.O. Okoth Ogendo, Ogunlade Davidson and Raymond Saner and the participants of the two workshops who helped us test the results. I would also like to thank the Foundation for International Environmental Law and Development for giving us permission to reproduce the Topical Index to the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change. In particular, I would like to thank Frédéric Gagnon-Lebrun, who has helped to check and double check the information in this document. I hope that this "Survival Guide" will help the negotiators from the South cope with the complexity and uncertainty of international negotiations. Forewarned is forearmed.

Joyeeta Gupta